


Happy Is What Happens

by mademoisellePlume



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: F/M, OC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-18
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 13:05:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1649669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mademoisellePlume/pseuds/mademoisellePlume
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Jake and the others left, life goes on for Cassie the Animorph. Life, and what comes after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happy Is What Happens

**Author's Note:**

> Are you reading this fic before reading Derin's fic, Future? I'd suggest you read it first, and then come back. http://archiveofourown.org/works/1650452 (We swear we didn't plan it this way!)
> 
> I was given a request for this fic, and I hope I followed it to the exact letter of the request. 
> 
> Justanotherghostwriter said "#WILL BEGGING YOU TO LEAVE THE CAKE ALONE HELP IN ANY WAY? #BECAUSE I CAN BEG #I CAN BEG FOR A LONG TIME" in the tags on a post.

I lived with Ronnie for a good ten years. We had a daughter and I named her Kelly. Everyone seemed to expect me to name her Rachel but the world was full of tiny Rachels then. People remembered Rachel and her sacrifices.

It was so easy for them to forget the children recruited and sent to the slaughter. The Auxiliaries were one of my bigger regrets, and there wasn’t much that could really make up for what we’d done there. There wasn’t any of them left to apologize to, no one to beg forgiveness. Like so many other things, this was just something else I had to learn to live with.

Like letting my friends go without me.

They were dead now, I knew. Jake’s parents hoped. Marco’s father hoped.

Eva, Loren and I all knew better.

Kelly was six when Ronnie and I came to the quiet understanding that being quite good friends that enjoyed physical intimacy was no longer enough for him. He moved out, and Kelly began to come to my home on weekends.

Divorce could be so drastically different for different couples. I remembered visiting Rachel’s house before the war. I thought arguments were fights then, little battles that erupted over anything. Naomi and Dan couldn’t keep their voices down long enough to tell Rachel dinner was going to be late. Ronnie and I didn’t shout once. There wasn’t any need.

Love.

He wanted love.

Of course, I couldn’t offer that. My heart belonged to a little boy general with genocide on his shoulders and dark depression behind his temples. A dead boy.

I don’t know if I loved Jake either, really. Certainly I couldn’t have been with him. He couldn’t have been with anyone, the way he was. The war had changed us. But, no matter if we could have been together, we still had owned pieces of each other we never really got back.

How could I say I loved Ronnie when I knew the depths love could go to? Ronnie was a good man. But I can’t say I’d want him at my back in a life-or-death battle.

Love shouldn’t be about battle scenarios.

Career was something else that was also about the war, always. Politics. I wasn’t cut out for it, but I was determined to succeed. To solidify the laws protecting the Hork-Bajir, the Taxxon nothlits, the tiny pool that fed YPM members that had been granted amnesty. I fought for improvements to the Americans with Disabilities Act, remembering that ward of lonely, forgotten children. I was in congress when Kelly was eleven.

When Marco was declared dead, and his will finally read out, I cried. Money to the church Loren had worked in before we found her, that she even now attended and volunteered with. Money to protect whales. Money to soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. A scholarship for disadvantaged kids with one or more dead parents in their adolescence. A house for his mother.

Eva, official Ambassador to the Andalite Homeworld, didn’t really need it, but it made a lovely guest home for visiting alien officials. They were very impressed at staying in the home of one of Earth’s infamous Animorphs.

They seemed… very respectful of me. The non-Andalites were, by and large, a mixture of awed by and fearful of me. The Andalites were exceedingly courteous but never warm. I didn’t forget Aldrea’s story. I didn’t forget what they were ready to do to our planet. I wasn’t warm to them either.

I didn’t forget it was Andalites who took the rest of my friends away.

In my more paranoid moments, I suspected it had all been a trick. That whatever had taken Ax was Andalite-engineered, and they wanted the children of Earth who had defeated their greatest enemy to be neatly finished off.

In my more sensible moments, I wished I had any reason to think I was wrong about my paranoid thoughts.

I wondered if they had assumed I would go too.

Joke was on them. I was the one left behind.

When Kelly was thirteen, I insisted she live with me week-round.

Ronnie didn’t fight it, knowing that if it went to court, no judge on Earth would tell me I had no right to not be especially worried about my child at this age.

My daughter loved doing her hair in different styles. I had never experimented much when I was a teenager, and now I had dreads that crept down my back as they grew longer. But when I had been little, my mother had done my hair in every sort of style.

Now I enjoyed bonding with Kelly in this way, becoming her own personal hairdresser in the early mornings before she went to school.

“Mom?”

“Mmm?”

“Were you happy when you won the war?” My hands stilled. They were learning about the Yeerk war in school now, I knew. That was where this question came from. She’d always known the bare bones of the matter. She’d grown up knowing aliens of all sorts, and still loved her Aunt Toby. She knew Yeerks in the now-defunct YPM, who came and visited with me often. But questions about how the war had made me feel had never really come up before.

My hands started to move again mechanically braiding hair. “Couldn’t be happier. But we’d crossed lines that we could never cross back over.” I sighed heavily. “I was happy to win. I was happy the war was done with. But the work had just started. And the time to tally up our losses had begun.”

Winning had never felt like winning. It had just felt like being victors.

I ran for president when Kelly was sixteen.

My opponents told me that America wasn’t ready for a candidate like me. They threw out my war crimes to discredit me. They told me I was weak and emotional and far too merciful.

When I was told that at the debate, I laughed for a while and then smiled, showing my mouth full of wolf fangs.

While Kelly was choosing her major, I encouraged Andalite tourism. I was more comfortable the more Andalites had human morphs and a fondness for our food.

Kelly was possibly the luckiest girl to ever want to be an artist in the modern age. I don’t know if she was very good, all of her pieces were works of art to me. From the finger-paints she’d done as a toddler to the oil paintings she now laboured over for hours. But every dignitary on and off the planet wanted something she’d done. It was something to hang on your wall, and point to and brag about having something done by the only child of an Animorph.

She did a piece for me, of the six of us, standing together in our morphing clothes, and I kept it in my room under a cloth. I don’t know how my daughter was able to get the eyes like that, but everytime I looked at it, I needed privacy until I could put myself back together again.

At the end of my second term, I was introduced to Diana. Kelly looked worried, which confused me, and I wondered if she’d understood the whole story about Rachel and Tobias. If I had been fine with my best friend dating a bird, why on earth did she worry about my reaction to her girlfriend?

When Diana told me later about her parents, I understood. My daughter had always known support in her family. Learning that Diana had been disowned upon transitioning must have rattled her.

Ronnie and his wife liked her. But it was when Toby, getting crotchety in her old age, approved of Diana, I knew I could relax about my daughter’s future.

When I finished my second term, I considered retiring, and instead began my campaign to represent the United Federation of Nations. It wasn’t quite being ‘President of the World’ but it was being the one to represent the Earth in intergalactic matters.

Alloran sent me congratulations over my victory and warned me to be careful.

I welcomed a class of young Andalite vecols to Earth a few months later, and tried not to notice there were as many of them as there had once been Auxiliaries.

Helmacrons showed up and some of Jake’s soldiers saw to them instead, and for once I enjoyed the privileges in rank by not having anything to do with them at all.

Earth solidified a treaty with the Skrit Na, protecting some of us from being kidnapped, and gaining trading rights out of it.

I created a trans-national organization, funded by the UFN, with scientists and engineers dedicated to taking the alien technology we’d been left in the war and had gained since, and in developing new technologies that were specific to Earth itself. I even consented to morphing demonstrations and blood samples, so the morphing technology could be closer examined without an Escafil device.

A year after I was elected, I woke to an Andalite tail-blade slicing through my neck, and I did not morph in time to save myself.

Dying was livelier than I had thought it would be. The Ellimist appeared to me, and all of the aches and pains that had come with middle-age fell away.

“I come to each one of you. Rachel, Marco, Ax I each gave the story of how I came to be, how the conflict between Crayak and I became. Tobias, I gave the story of his father. I think you would appreciate knowing where this all started also.”

I stared at the creature of incredible power. “What did you tell David?”

“Crayak’s creatures belong to him. I have no ability to intercede.” The Ellimist shrugged, something I had to imagine he’d picked up from Marco.

“And Jake?”

“...Crayak’s creatures-”

I snapped. “He was never Crayak’s creature! How dare you? You know he rejected each and every offer that-”

“Rachel didn’t.” He turned away from me as I gaped and swiped a hand across inky space. The awful creature Rachel had been for a short time when David had made his short return appeared there. “That was enough to give him domain over her spirit. I took her spirit instead, ending her existence and granting her peace. And I gave him Jake’s spirit.”

“Without asking-”

“I asked. He said yes.” The Ellimist met my eyes, and I knew it had seemed an even trade to him.

“And does Jake’s spirit get peace?” I demanded, but I knew the answer. “I get something? And you want it to be a story? No. No, never. I let him go once, never again.

“You will never get peace.” The Ellimist warned me.

“I’ve had enough peace at the cost of letting my friends go and suffer. I had happiness, and they died. I had power, I had family, and they were desperately alone before it all ended. I won’t let Jake do this alone. I wouldn’t let anyone do this alone.”

Jake’s little endless hellscape was a puppet show. He relived our war over and over. He made the same decisions, the same mistakes, and had the same losses. Again and again.

And now, so did I. But I wouldn’t abandon him to suffer through it alone for anything.

 


End file.
